The descriptions of politics are so devoid of details any journalist could have written them. What comes of Adler's writing is an emotional numbness that seems to have permeated everything she engaged in and presents to us a protagonist that is, in a bizarre way, both present and absent. Margot's voice sounds like that of a tourist of the revolution, not of a young person who was in the whirl of it. She emphasizes this commendable fact throughout her narrative, and this repeated statement allowed me to pinpoint precisely what I sensed was missing from her narrative – dimension. Margot remained, as she put it, sex-free, drug-free, rock-and-roll-free. Interestingly, the counterculture did not leave an impression on her. She was on the scene of the major events of the New Left sixties as they unfolded. As soon as she arrived in Berkeley in 1964, she joined the Free Speech Movement, signed on for voter registration and took a soldier fighting in Vietnam for a pen pal. Although she remained the ardently leftist daughter of her ardently leftist parents, inside she turned into a bundle of insecurities.Īccording to Margot, her experience in the 1960s were nearly identical to her parents's experiences in the thirties and forties. From that moment on, Margot's life became a ceaseless effort to balance the family values with the urges of her neurotic unhappiness. Following her parents' advice about joy became difficult. Margot coped with the family problems by eating herself into an 180-pound body. Freyda succumbed to dangerous depression. They stopped loving each other and divorced when she was eleven.
Margot's parents did not manage to live up to what they taught their daughter. Both parents were fellow travelers of the Communist party, so Margot was brought up surrounded by wealthy, well-connected lefties, who taught her that a good life was one that combined personal and communal interests and that the point of it was to experience one's self with joy. Her father was Kurt Adler, the son of the famous Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, and Freyda Adler, a beautiful, energetic New York school teacher.
This memoir of the 1960s was written by Margot Adler, a leading figure in the feminist spirituality and witchcraft movement.Īdler was born in 1946 into a sophisticated left-wing family.
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